PRC cracking down on state vehicle use — $199,000 in fuel and maintenance per year:
By statute, the Public Regulation Commission (PRC) has a lot of responsibilities — as diverse as regulating utilities, insurance, transportation, even taxi cabs and overseeing the state’s fire marshal’s office.
The commission also has a big fleet of state vehicles — 102 of them for an agency with 260 employees.
In an effort to boost efficiency and reduce potential abuse, the people running the PRC are instituting reforms and safeguards to make sure staffers are using those state-issued vehicles for legitimate purposes.
“I have made it clear to staff what our policy is,” PRC chief of staff Johnny Montoya said Tuesday (Nov. 8), “so I am approving all take-home vehicle practices.”
According to Montoya and his aides, the PRC spends $199,000 a year on fuel, oil and maintainance for its fleet and that of its 260 employees, 120 are eligible to use state vehicles.
That ratio concerns PRC commissioner and chairman Pat Lyons. “People take them [the vehicles] home too much,” Lyons said Tuesday, adding, “We need to get a handle on the vehicles being used here.” Lyons said when he served in the State Land Office (SLO), there were 33 vehicles on the SLO fleet for a department of 155 employees.
“The division directors [at the PRC] need better oversight and record-keeping,” Lyons said.
In fairness, the majority of the 120 PRC vehicles are assigned to the commission’s fire marshal’s office, which has responsibilities that can include first-reponse and whose employees have access to vehicles through an agreement between the state and its employees.
Johnny Montoya, PRC chief of staff
“I don’t think there are any employees taking a vehicle here and then taking it home now,” Montoya said, “but there were when I started … we need to be more consistent.”
Montoya, who took over as chief of staff in March of this year, says the PRC is on the verge of instituting policies to ensure cost effiencies. “Once the commissioners vote on the changes,” Montoya said, “everything is in place” to make the proposals official policy.
Among the changes? A single, centralized system to assign and approve use of vehicles plus requirements for employees to fill out logs to make sure expenses associated with the vehicle are legitimate.
In addition, new computer software has been installed to ensure everything’s on the up-and-up. “If there’s a state vehicle and it gets more than one fill-up every 24 hours, I get an e-mail,” Montoya said, adding that if somebody who has checked out a state vehicle fills the tank with anything more expensive than regular, unleaded gas, he also receives an e-mail alert.
Earlier this year, former PRC commissioner Jerome Block Jr. caused a political firestorm when he was charged with (and later admitted to) misusing his state-issued gasoline card, often while driving state vehicles.
But Montoya says updating the policy “happened before Jerome. We started this a long time ago.”
Montoya emphasized that PRC employees are honest and concerned about making sure tax dollars are not wasted. In fact, Montoya wrote an op-ed piece in last Sunday’s Santa Fe New Mexican praising staffers in the wake of the Block controversy and points out that Block’s transgressions were first caught by PRC employees.
But has the bad publicity made some employees a little more aware of making sure everything is done above-board?
“I think the Jerome thing scared a lot of people here,” Montoya said, “and they are hedging on the safe side.”
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